It Is Reasonable To Hope

Time Is The Supreme Law Of Nature.

To The Pure Geometer The Radius Of Curvature Is An Incidental Characteristic - Like The Grin Of The Cheshire Cat. To The Physicist It Is An Indispensable Characteristic. It Would Be Going Too Far To Say That To The Physicist The Cat Is Merely Incidental To The Grin. Physics Is Concerned With Interrelatedness Such As The Interrelatedness Of Cats And Grins. In This Case The "cat Without A Grin" And The "grin Without A Cat" Are Equally Set Aside As Purely Mathematical Phantasies.

If Someone Points Out To You That Your Pet Theory Of The Universe Is In Disagreement With Maxwell's Equations - Then So Much The Worse For Maxwell's Equations. If It Is Found To Be Contradicted By Observation - Well, These Experimentalists Do Bungle Things Sometimes. But If Your Theory Is Found To Be Against The Second Law Of Thermodynamics I Can Give You No Hope; There Is Nothing For It But To Collapse In Deepest Humiliation.

If I Let My Fingers Wander Idly Over The Keys Of A Typewriter It Might Happen That My Screed Made An Intelligible Sentence. If An Army Of Monkeys Were Strumming On Typewriters They Might Write All The Books In The British Museum. The Chance Of Their Doing So Is Decidedly More Favourable Than The Chance Of The Molecules Returning To One Half Of The Vessel.

[when Thinking About The New Relativity And Quantum Theories] I Have Felt A Homesickness For The Paths Of Physical Science Where There Are Ore Or Less Discernible Handrails To Keep Us From The Worst Morasses Of Foolishness.